Tuesday, 6 February 2007

Some updates

People who have been having problems with Awn regarding artifacts appearing on the icons, this has been fixed in SVN. Its an wonder what properly clearing the cairo_context_t will make ;).

Also, I have been working on improving the D&D code, and you can now drop URI's to a launcher and it will start the program with that file. It works quite well around the desktop, i.e. dragging a movie file to the Totem launcher starts Totem!

Also, this works for multiple selections aswell, i.e. high-lighting more than one picture in Nautilus, and dragging it to the GThumb launcher will start GThumb with all the selected files displayed!

You can continue to D&D to a launcher even after it has become associated with another window!

Please bear in mind that not all of the desktop works the same ie. dragging the URL from Firefox to the Epiphany launcher does nothing, however it works if you drag a URL from Epiphany to Firefox! Its up to the application as to how well-behaved it is in a D&D situation. However, I am working to support more targets if I can.

Also, please remember that the launched application is still under the control of Awn, therefore if Awn dies, the application goes with it! If anyone can shed some light how I can launch an application in a way that it survives if Awn closes, I would be most grateful!

I have changed the gconf code , so you should not be getting anymore segfaults after the make install. Some people have commented that it is hard to keep track of SVN changes, so whenever there is a new feature implemented, I am going to add it into the README file, so its easier everyone to know whats new. (I also update the Changelog file, but I can be more descriptive in the README).

In regards to forking processes off awn, I know that the 'screen' command works for me in the case of wanting to launch applications from a terminal and to not kill them when I close the terminal window. It is used simply as 'screen <command>'.

However, I am not sure this is ideal; screen is in reality a full-blown 'pager for the terminal', and this functionality is almost a side-effect; screen is also not usually installed by default. Have you looked into what the gnome panel does?